Creating order in the chaos

My alarm went off at 4am. I hopped out of bed, used the bathroom, then sneaked into the kitchen to make my coffee.

Today is a new day, with a new schedule. Yesterday in Living Well Spending Less, Ruth talked about creating a schedule to help create habits. The point of creating the schedule is so that you do the same things every morning until they become a mindless habit. I wake up early, but by mid day I am drained and have no energy left to do much of anything. The author talked about this same problem – she states that creating a schedule that she can do mindlessly in the morning saves some brain power so that she has more energy for longer in the day. This idea sounds amazing, and could be my saving grace for the duration of this pregnancy.

The days are long, and my patience are worn down to a tiny sliver of a nub by time 5pm rolls around – cooking dinner & bed time are exhausting and turn me into a little bit of a Monster.

It seems hard to imagine, I suppose – but as a work from home Mom, my days are slam packed. I work every free minute I have, of course there is some mindless facebook scrolling, which I really should cut out – but I justify it by saying that I can’t possibly work every single second, it’s my life, and I should at least enjoy some of it. But the thing is, scrolling facebook really isn’t even all that enjoyable. There is nothing but bad news there, and it makes me feel more guilty than anything else. It’s just one of those habits that I’ve created that I haven’t broken yet. The best thing I’ve done recently, is turn off my facebook feed in my google chrome browser, which is my most used browser. I’ve only done this on my laptop, but I’m going to install it on my desktop as well.

This may seem pointless because you could just turn it back on, that’s true, but from what I can tell it takes more than a few seconds to uninstall and turn your feed back on, so for now, it’s done it’s job to keep me from scrolling to much on my laptop.

I’m hopeful that imposing a schedule will help me feel more organized, and less spastic. I’ve been struggling with motivation since I got back from Nashville. July was a great month for my business, but since I got back I’ve felt all out whack & off kilter. To be honest, I’ve really had to re-evaluate what my priorities are & what was causing me the most stress & heartache.

Creating a schedule with such a tight timeline allows me to focus & keeps me from wandering all over the place. A simple task, such as writing this blog post, could take me over an hour if I allowed it. I would wander around from website to website, then come back to the post, write a few sentences, then check my email, check my online business office, get more coffee, check out what’s new on pinterest, come back the post, rinse/repeat. You know the drill, you’re probably familiar with it yourself. This is creating chaos in my life. I simply don’t have the extra time in my day for simple tasks to take 2-3x longer than they need to take.

Ruth issued this challenge to me (not me personally, but in her book, you know what I’m saying, right?):

“what would happen if you spent the next week writing down every single thing you did?

Would you find that your time log matched your priorities?

What would happen if someone else were to observe how you use your time? Would your long term vision be immediately apparent? Does the way you use our time clearly reflect what is most important to you?